Ways to Ensure You’re Hiring the Right Marketing Company

How to pick the right digital marketing agency for your business? When you’re selecting a digital marketing agency it’s really important that you go through a series of questions and points with them to make sure that they are the right fit for you. There’s a lot of different agencies out there that all specialize in different services and in different types of websites that they help. Make sure that you really hone in on a few core things.

Make Sure the Agency Has Worked in Your Niche

The first thing you’re going to want to do is make sure that you review results. Go to the agency and ask for information in your specific niche or for your specific type of business and ask to see a track record of success in that area. If they can show you that then you know that they’ve been able to get success for people in the past that have been inside the same type of business area as you.

What is their Experience in Your Niche

The second thing is make sure you understand their experience in your niche and that they can speak to that. It doesn’t necessarily need to be the only thing that they do, but if they have some experience in that area or have staff there that have some experience in that area and they can speak to specific goals that you were trying to achieve inside your niche then you know that they’re going to be a better fit for you.

Always Check Prior Clients

Next is you definitely want to check references. You should be looking for anywhere from two to five references where you get on a call with one of their current clients and you ask them about their experience with the company. Do they do a good job building relationships? Are they very responsive and what type of results have they been getting for you? Those type of things are really important. Make sure you talk to somebody, interview them, ask them specific questions and that’s going to allow you to have a better idea of what the agency can achieve for you.

Is the Agency’s Marketing Up to Par

How does their own marketing look? I always find this to be something that’s really really important because if they’re not doing any marketing for themselves that might be an indicator that they’re too busy or perhaps they don’t really have a good foundation for marketing. Any digital marketing agency should be doing marketing for themselves on some level. Usually when somebody goes to a digital marketing agency they’re looking for a specialty, it might be search engine optimization (SEO), it might be Amazon, it might be paid media, it might be email marketing or could be Facebook; the list goes on. When you go to the agency make sure that they’re able to speak to the specific needs that you have and they don’t try to kind of take that pain point and move you into a different program that’s just a better fit for them. Whenever you go to an agency make sure they have the specific skill set that you’re looking for that you don’t have in-house. That’s going to allow you guys to have a better partnership and to be more successful.

You Get What You Pay For

One of the most important things is understand the full value of the agency meaning don’t necessarily try to pick the cheapest agency. There’s agencies out there that will charge you $50 or $100 a month. Then there’s other agencies out there who won’t even talk to you unless you’ve got you know $50,000 to $200,000 a month to spend and even bigger than that. It’s important that you find the right price point that fits with the skill set and the services that you need that are specific to your business. Don’t go the cheapest option maybe don’t go the most expensive option just find the right option in the right price point for you. Don’t try to cheap out too much because then you’re going to be wasting valuable time and money.

Agency Prestige Isn’t Everything

Prestige matters on some level, but it’s not the most important thing. What do I mean by that? Well if you go to an agency’s website generally they’re going to showcase some of their top clients and what you want to see is that they at least have a few of those in there and that they’ve been able to deliver for a couple top clients for some time. It’s not the only thing that’s important right you want to make sure they have experience in your niche, you want to make sure that they’re able to meet that specific specialization for you and then also sometimes these agencies they might have just worked with this big client for a month on a really small project and they’re a huge client, but they just slapped their logo on the website. In other cases kind of cheating agencies might actually put a client’s logo on their website who they have never worked with or they just did some free work for a friend who works there. So these are things you need to watch out for. Generally at the end of the day you just want to know that they’ve got a few core bigger clients that they’ve been able to service and that have some prestige and that’s going to allow you to feel little bit more comfortable in their service level.

Check Agency’s Rank In Google

How do they rank in Google? What does their social media look like? Do they generally have a good online presence? One of the things you want to look at is if they do rank well in Google well that’s a great indicator that the business has been around for a long time and that they’re associated with big keywords that have to do with their service and that people find them credible for the specific services that they’re offering. It’s always a good idea to check that maybe put their website into SEMrush. If it’s a digital marketing agency they should be doing some search engine optimization and paid media on some level.

Check Quality of Reports

The last item: make sure to get a few sample reports. When you’re looking at reporting with the digital marketing agency it can be really really important. Do they offer custom reports? Do they offer a custom dashboard and is that going to be the type of high level reporting that you’re going to need to either report up the line or if you’re the business owner to allow you to digest the most important information that you need. Custom reporting is great. What do the reports look like? When you look at those reports are they actually getting results for some of these clients and would it be the type of results that you would want to get yourself?

Okay so that’s it for choosing a digital marketing agency. It’s an incredibly important part of any business to have an agency because it allows you to have work that’s overflow go out to other people and allows you to bring in specialists for things that you might not have in-house. In some cases it may be cheaper to go with an agency then bring that person in-house. In many cases the specialist can get you better results than you would be able to get in-house because they have a lot of top talent. Definitely something that every business should look at and when you’re ready to get a digital marketing agency make sure you go through this checklist of questions.